Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today

by Kurt H. Wolff

Su"ender and give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi­ cal essay with the help of this old his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus.

422 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1976

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't read all of this. In fact, I don't even know how much of it I've read. And I've never met anyone who's heard of it. But a symposium I took as an undergraduate had a lengthy excerpt from this as part of the course reading materials. The excerpt included a fascinating metaphysical analysis of how someone receives, processes, and is affected by artwork. I've remembered it with whimsy ever since.

It's been out of print for decades and sells for hundreds of dollars on book sites. But Google books features it for free.